Opens in a new tab. Come back here for the guide, the checklist and the calculator.
Opens in a new tab. Come back here for the guide, the checklist and the calculator.
For experts with a platform · Meta ads → a paid Skool
Only cold traffic truly validates.
Four campaigns, run in order, that turn Meta ads into members of the room that pays you on repeat for what you already know, love and do. Two of them test what Skool is already promoting for free. Two of them buy the attention back.
Tap a stage to jump in
Stage zero · before you spend a dollar
Nobody opens Instagram saying "I hope I see an ad today." Your ad is a disruption to their regularly scheduled programming. When one actually lands — when someone thinks holy shit, this is exactly what I'm looking for — the very next thing they do is go and check your page to see whether you're a real person. If there's nothing there with your face on it, you paid for that click twice and got nothing.
Tick these off as you get them. It saves in this browser, so the list is still here next time you open it.
The part most people miss
Growth Boost means Skool pays to run ads promoting your community. Every single person who sees one is cold traffic — they didn't come from your content, they've never heard of you, and they're deciding in about a second and a half.
Which means your offer has to have product-market fit with an audience that knows nothing. Who it is, what it is, who it's for, and how it helps — clear, and clear fast.
So Stages 01 and 02 aren't really about ads. They're you doing your homework on the two assets Skool is about to put in front of strangers, on Skool's budget, whether you tested them or not.
You're not spending money to get members here. You're spending a little to find out what to hand Skool.
| Stage | What it costs you | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Small test budget, a few days | A banner cold traffic picked |
| 02 | Same small budget again | Positioning that converts strangers |
| 03 | $5 a day | Followers, comments, ManyChat sends |
| 04 | 2–3× your front-end, daily | Members |
| Boost | Skool's money. You pay a commission per member who joins. | Cold traffic hitting a banner that already won |
Screenshot this
The whole system, in order, with the one thing you're allowed to change at each step. If you only save one thing from here, save this.
| Stage | Campaign | Budget | The one thing you change | Read it on |
|---|
You also need a Facebook Business Manager and an ad account before any of this runs. That's the bit nobody mentions until you're trying to press publish.
The order is the strategy
There are plenty of other campaigns you can run. These are the four I actually run, in the order I actually run them — validate the offer with cold traffic, get more members out of Growth Boost, then grow the organic presence that makes the next round cheaper.
This is for you if
Want one person looking over the whole thing?
Sixty minutes on your funnel, your offer ladder and your ad set-up. You walk away with a custom strategy document and your next two to three highest-leverage moves mapped to your goals — the plan, not homework to go figure out.
Want the templates instead?
The About Page Alchemist, the ad templates and the AI-powered systems I used to find every version in here. Plus a room full of Puffins building it their way.
Numbers and set-ups here are mine, from my own account and my own community, and they're a mechanism rather than a promise — ad costs move with your niche, your creative and your offer. Growth Boost terms, Meta's campaign options and Skool's commission are set by those platforms and change without asking me. Test on a small budget first, always.
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